Resident Gaijin

P A R T T W O

1 RESIDENT GAIJIN

When does a lovelost refugee become but a man again?

Even after a year of living here, the Japanese continue to surprise me. Patronage to an establishment such as this would be impossible, I’m sure, anywhere else in the entire world. Selling silicone sex to the stupidly saturated adult market of Japan? It seemed like a real life ice to Eskimos deal.

It was at the tail end of my visa when Dalton suggested we open the store and gain my residency in the process. I had laughed. When he suggested it again, and again, in earnest, with plans and details and financial accountability, I stopped laughing. I’d always taken his dreams of The Plastic Palace – as it was known then – as somewhat of an outlet, a promise he made to himself so that he could continue working the nine to seven, rinse and repeat rigmarole of his day job without self-destructing. When he sat me down and pointed out our combined savings and the potential profit we could make if the plastic picked up, I started to listen. The fact that here we are, six months later, fighting to survive but surviving, nevertheless, astounds me.

Even after a year of living here, the Japanese continue to surprise me.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: So one of the many difficulties of posting as I write, LIVE IN ILLINOIS as it were, is that sometimes things don’t go the way I want them to, and you guys end up seeing that stuff. I wanted to write KOTW – during KOTW month – chronologically, and naturally I thought “start at the beginning.”

Writing is as much about trial and error or – more often than not – accidents as it is anything else. I realised as I was writing the latter parts of our protagonists touch down in Japan that this, in fact, is not where his story begins. It begins in the Womb – it can’t begin anywhere else other than behind that counter, surrounded by faux-orifices and fantastic feng shui. Origin stories and flashbacks and time leaps will suffice in explaining how he got there without the need to elaborate on the less that exciting parts of the overall timeline. I want KOTW to be a blast from beginning to end. So think of this, part 2, as a rebirth of sorts. I’m sure Part 1 will have a place somewhere in the finished product, but it isn’t going to be in the present.